She did the same for Victor Hugo when she played Doña Sol and the Queen in _Ruy Bias_. Théodore de Banville, in his _Camées Parisiens_, says there could never be another Queen in _Ruy Bias_ like Sarah, and that, whenever the words:
“Elle avait un petit diadème en dentelle d’argent”
are spoken, the vision of Sarah Bernhardt will rise, as though it were that of a real person, frail, slender, with a small crown set in her wonderful hair.
Yet, when all is said and done, Sarah Bernhardt’s supreme achievement is another and a fourth: her Phèdre. I do not think that anyone will disagree with this. It was in _Phèdre_ that she gave the maximum of beauty, and exhibited the whole range of her highest artistic qualities. In _Phèdre_ her movements and her gestures, her explosions of fury and her outbursts of passion, were subservient to a commanding rhythm; from the moment Phèdre walked on to the stage trembling under the load of her unconfessed passion until the moment she descended into Hades, _par un chemin plus lent_, the spectator witnessed the building up of a miraculous piece of architecture, in time and not in space; and followed the progressions, the rise, the crisis, and the tranquil close of a mysterious symphony. Moreover, a window was opened for him wide on to the enchanted land: the realm of beauty in which there are no conflicts of times and fashions, but in which all who bear the torch have an equal inheritance. He saw a woman speaking the precise, stately, and musical language of the court of Louis XIV., who, by her utterance, the plastic beauty of her attitudes, and the rhythm of her movements, opened the gates of time, and beyond the veil of the seventeenth century evoked the vision of ancient Greece. Or, rather, time was annihilated, seventeenth-century France and ancient Greece, Versailles and Trézène, were merged into one; he was face to face with involuntary passion and the unequal struggle between it and reluctant conscience.
There was the unwilling prey of the goddess, “a lily on her brow with anguish moist and fever dew”; but at the sound of her voice and the music of her grief, perhaps we forgot all this, perhaps we forgot the ancient tales of Greece, and Crete, we forgot Racine and Versailles; perhaps we thought only of the woman that was there before us, who surely was something more than human: was it she who plied the golden loom in the island of Ææa and made Ulysses swerve in mid-ocean from his goal? Or she who sailed down the Cydnus and revelled with Mark Antony? Or she for whom Geoffroy Rudel sailed to Tripoli, and sang and died? Or she who haunted the vision but baffled the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci? Or she who excelled “all women in the magic of her locks,” and beckoned to Faust on the Brocken? She was something of all these things, an incarnation of the spirit that, in all times and in all countries, whether she be called Lilith or Lamia or La Gioconda, in the semblance of a “Belle Dame sans Merci,” bewitches the heart and binds the brain of man with a spell, and makes the world seem a dark and empty place without her, and Death for her sake and in her sight a joyous thing.